Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I attended a meeting on Monday with the Arctic Winter Games International Committee. The two host communities of Greenland and Nunavut raised the issue that they are pretty small and they may not be able to accommodate certain sports. One of them is the biathlon. Their argument is they do not have the facilities or the know how for hosting the biathlon. This meeting was the first time I had heard about it as the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
In the course of the meeting, I understand it will not be until June or July before things get finalized in this area. We may have a chance to try and convince them to include the biathlon in the next games.
I did go to the biathlon site in Whitehorse and I have seen the facility that is required. I do not think it would be that much more to have this type of facility in either Iqaluit or Nuuk. It is really up to the host communities to tell us what they are capable of providing.
The other sports they were looking at was the ice sports. As you know, they had three ice surfaces in Whitehorse, yet they still had to go an hour by bus to Haines Junction for another arena over there. They were able to accommodate all of the ice sports there.
The way the division of the sports is going to be in the next two years from now, from what I understand between Nuuk and Iqaluit, is that the ice sports will be in Iqaluit. They only have one ice surface. They were looking at how we would deal with it. During the meeting, we suggested that perhaps an hour on a bus is about the same as an hour on the plane and that is the way that transportation gets done in the North. Why do they not look at Kimmurut or Pangnirtung or some of the other small communities close to Iqaluit to do the ice sports?
Some of the comments from other participants were that the Arctic Winter Games are there to see how other people live. There are athletes from the bigger centres that will have a good opportunity to go into the smaller communities to see how other people live. I think the ice sports are going to be in if they use the outlying communities around Iqaluit to accommodate them. That was my understanding of the meeting. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.